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Tuesday, 19 December 2017

Capital Ring 1/2: Woolwich - Grove Park

Gothic bridge across the moat at Eltham Palace, where a mediaeval drawbridge once stood.

The Capital Ring gets off to a splendid start,
climbing from the wide vistas of the Thames Path at Woolwich through a chain of
parks in Charlton, across Shooters Hill and through Oxleas Woods, one of the
most extensive and beautiful areas of ancient woodland in inner London. The
trail then passes historic Eltham Palace, takes an ancient lane through a
surprisingly rural landscape to Mottingham and follows the river Quaggy to
Grove Park. For most of the way, from near the Thames Barrier onwards, it
shares its paths with the Green Chain Walk.

In this post, as in most others, I’ve tackled two official
sections at once. The official break point is at Falconwood, though there are
numerous other stations and bus stops. This is one of the most rugged sections
of the route, particularly through Oxleas Woods, reaching the highest point on
the trail at 128 m.

Woolwich

The Woolwich Ferry, one of London's best free rides.

The south bank of the river Thames from Deptford
downstream was historically part of the county of Kent, the successor to an
Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Kent was once divided into ‘lathes’ and then into
‘hundreds’, and this northwest corner of the county was part of the Lathe of
Sutton-at-Hone and the Hundred of Blackheath. For some notes on Kent in
general, see my post on the London Loop alternative from Dartford to Crayford.

On
the water’s edge, the surroundings are naturally flat and marshy, historically
used for rough pasture and later for the sorts of industries that required
plenty of space. But travelling south from the riverside, the land rises
rapidly into a ridge of low hills, thrown up about 40 million years ago by the
same geological incident that created the Alps, when the tectonic plates
carrying Africa and Europe collided. As elsewhere in London, chalk underlies
the surface, but it’s covered by a layer of gravels, sands, silts and clays
deposited around 55 million years ago and known as Woolwich Beds.

Historically, settlements here tended to stick to the
heights, or squeeze onto outcrops of firmer ground nearer the river. A Celtic oppidum or fortified town stood on the
riverside at Woolwich from the Iron Age, the only one of its kind known in the
London area, re-occupied in the later part of the Roman era as a fort
protecting the approaches to London. In Anglo-Saxon times the place was most
likely a quiet fishing village, perhaps with a sideline in river-borne trade.
The name means ‘trading place for wool,’ though no other evidence of an ancient
wool market has been found. Woolwich was first granted a market charter in 1618
but a market of some sort almost certainly operated before this: its early
history is also unknown.

From the early 9th century, most of Woolwich, except
for some riverside quays, was held by a Flemish Benedictine abbey,
Sint-Pietersabdij in Gent. Between the 12th and 14th
centuries, the lands became part of the neighbouring manors of Dartford to the
east and Eltham to the south, although Woolwich was usually considered a
distinct sub-manor within Eltham. The area was particularly susceptible to
flooding, but was considered important enough for the monarch to charge various
people and bodies with the upkeep of river walls and dykes.

To the south, roughly paralleling the Thames but avoiding
its marshes, runs one of Britain’s most important historic highways, Watling
Street. Between them, the road and the river, and the easy transport links they
provided, encouraged a finger of ribbon development to creep along the
riverside from the capital. There are traces of industry such as pottery and
shipbuilding in Woolwich dating back to at least the 15th century.

But the overwhelming influence on the shape of the modern
town is its long association with the military and the navy. This dates from
the reign of Henry VIII, who first grasped the idea that naval power was the
key to dominance as the emerging European states rivalled with each other to
establish spheres of influence across the world. Henry chose Woolwich as the
location in 1512 for the first of three naval dockyards along this stretch of
the river – the dockyard at Deptford followed in 1513, with another, smaller
yard in Erith (on London Loop 1) operational by 1515.

All were within easy reach by river of each other and the
royal palace at Greenwich, and the facility at Woolwich enjoyed a location
where, in the words of late 18th century historian Edward Hasted, “the
channel lies direct east and west for about three miles [4.8 km], the tide runs
very strong, and the river is entirely free from shoals and sands, and has
seven or eight fathoms [12.8 – 14.6 m] water; so that the largest ships may
ride with safety, even at low water.” Henry’s flagship Henry grace à Dieu or Great
Harry was built at Woolwich and fitted out at Erith for its launch in 1515.
50 m long, weighing more than 1,000 tonnes and with a crew of up to 1,000, it
was the biggest ship yet built, but turned out to be unstable and top heavy and
saw little active service. Its fate is unknown: it may have been destroyed by
fire and abandoned close to its birthplace at Woolwich in 1553.

East of the dockyard was an area of riverside land
historically used as a rabbit warren: this passed into private hands after
Henry seized the abbey lands during the Dissolution in the late 1530s. Part
became a ropeyard which served the dockyard (there were 400 ropemakers in the
town by 1744), the rest an estate attached to a mansion known as Tower House.
By the 1650s a wharf next to the ropeyard was used by the Board of Ordnance to
store guns, which were tested on the warren with the owners’ permission. A gun
battery was installed to protect the river in 1667, and in 1671 the Board
swapped its ownership of the gun wharf for the rest of the Tower House estate.

Originally it was primarily used as a storage depot, but
with the establishment of the Royal Laboratory in 1695, it began producing
explosives, fuses and shot. The Royal Artillery Regiment was founded on the
site in 1716 and the Royal Military Academy in 1741. Early in the 19th
century these two institutions moved south to occupy an extensive chunk of
Woolwich Common, leaving the Warren to grow into what became known from 1805 as
the Royal Arsenal, ultimately the biggest arms factory in the UK. The presence
of dockyard and arsenal draped large parts of Woolwich in the veil of official
secrecy: for many years both sites appeared as blank spaces on maps.

The parish of Woolwich became an official part of London
in 1885 when it was placed under the jurisdiction of the new London County
Council, and in 1900 it was combined with the neighbouring parishes of Eltham
and Plumstead to create the Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich. When London was
expanded into Greater London in 1965, the boroughs were reorganised, and
Woolwich was merged with Greenwich as the London Borough of Greenwich. All but
the very end of this section of the Ring is in the borough, which since 2012
has been known as the Royal Borough of Greenwich – a fact you won’t fail to
notice from public signs thanks to an enthusiastic rebranding campaign.

1990s Moderne: Woolwich Arsenal station.

Our walk starts at Woolwich Arsenal station, opened in
1847 as Royal Arsenal station on the South Eastern Railway’s (SER) North Kent
Line from Strood to Deptford, where it connected with the London and Greenwich
Railway into London Bridge. The Arsenal, incidentally, had its own railway
system predating the public railway. Much of it was narrow gauge, but there
were also standard gauge lines which connected into the SER near Plumstead. Thanks
to the various military installations, Woolwich was already a busy place before
the railway opened, but the new station only encouraged further expansion, prompting
further growth around the station and helping shift the nucleus of the town
from the riverside.

The station has been rebuilt several times. The
distinctive ticket hall with its curved glazed walls and lantern nods at the
Moderne style of the 1920s but is in fact the work of British Rail architect
Nick Derbyshire, dating from 1993. In 2009 the station became an interchange
with the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) with the opening of a branch from
Canning Town via London City Airport and under the Thames to a terminus here.
Connections will improve further at the end of 2018 when a new station on the
Elizabeth Line (formerly known as Crossrail 1) opens just a short walk away on
the Royal Arsenal site. But one transport option no longer available is the
tram: the very last service on London’s original street tram network left
nearby Beresford Square for New Cross Gate in July 1952, taking more than three
hours to navigate the crowds of cheering Londoners lining the route.

General Gordon Square, facing you, lies directly over the
railway tracks. This was originally an open cutting, known as the Smoke Hole by
local market traders who had to contend with the discharge from steam
locomotives soiling their goods. It was finally covered over in 1928 after many
years of public protest, creating a public space named after military hero
Major-General Charles George Gordon (1833-85). He’s best known as Gordon of
Khartoum as he was in command during the year-long siege of the Sudanese city by
opponents of British and Egyptian rule under local religious leader Muhammed
Ahmad, the ‘Mahdi’, and was killed in action two days before a relief force
arrived. Gordon was born in Woolwich and attended the Royal Military Academy.

The square owes its present appearance to a makeover for
the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and is the first of numerous
Olympic legacies we’ll encounter on the Ring. Greenwich’s honorary ‘royal’
renaming was partly in commemoration of its role as one of the six ‘Olympic
Boroughs’ (the others were Barking and Dagenham, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets
and Waltham Forest), with three games venues including the Royal Artillery
Barracks just up the road, appropriately used for the shooting events, as well
as Greenwich Park and the O2. General Gordon Square was a designated ‘Live
Site’ where coverage of the Games was relayed to the big screen that still
stands today.

Overlooking the square on the right is the imposing
Woolwich Equitable Building, built in 1935 for the building society of the same
name. Designed to inspire the confidence
of members and investors, it adopted a hybrid of art deco and Baroque revival
styles, with an impressive three-storey frontage in Portland stone topped by a
tiled mansard roof.

The society itself was founded in 1842 on a temporary basis,
and became one of Britain’s first permanent building societies five years
later. Today it’s probably more strongly linked with the town in the popular
imagination than the Royal Arsenal, thanks to a popular advertising campaign in
the 1980s under the slogan “I’m with the Woolwich”. But like the Arsenal, it no
longer exists – it moved from Woolwich to Bexleyheath in 1989, turned itself
into a bank and was absorbed by Barclays in 2006. In 2011 its former home, now
Grade II listed, was converted into shops, a pub and various small offices.

The route passes the DLR station entrance and grazes the
edge of Beresford Square, the main location of the street market which now
operates six days a week. The original market site, as chartered in 1618, was
to the west nearer the river: the Beresford Square market was originally an
unofficial alternative favoured by traders keen to avoid tolls and enjoy
increased footfall in what was rapidly becoming the de facto centre of town. The market survived various attempts by
the authorities to suppress it and was finally legitimised in 1879.

Now apparently marooned in the square is a brick
gatehouse, the Beresford Gate which once formed the main gate to the Arsenal
complex. The ground floor of this was built in yellow brick in 1829 and named
after William Beresford, then Master-General of the Ordnance and governor of
the Royal Military Academy. The red brick upper storey was added in 1891. It’s
now owned by the council though rarely open.

The official Capital Ring link from Woolwich Arsenal
station follows a roundabout route via the Royal Arsenal complex and then along
the Thames, but I’ve opted for a more direct alternative via the streets of the
town centre. The Arsenal is well worth a detour, though there will be more of an
opportunity to discover it on future walks along the Thames Path, and I’ll say
a bit more about it then. At its peak during World War I, the site covered 530
ha and employed 80,000 people. Among the institutions to emerge from it are
Arsenal Football Club (1886), now in North London; the Royal Arsenal
Cooperative Society (1868), an important part of the Cooperative movement; and
the Peace Arsenal campaign, which successfully implemented the ‘swords into
ploughshares’ principle here for a few years after World War I.

Military activities declined in stages from the later part
of the 20th century, with dire consequences for local employment.
The Royal Ordnance Factory closed in 1967 and the eastern section of the site,
including much open land used for testing, was sold off to the Greater London
Council to build the new town of Thamesmead. In 1986, the land closest to
Beresford Square was used for road widening – thus the current marooned
location of the gatehouse, which was, amazingly, at first threatened with demolition
under the same scheme. The rest of the site remained in Ministry of Defence use
until 1994. It has subsequently been redeveloped, though with many of the
historic buildings conserved, with the former blank space finally opened to
public access in 2008. Building is still ongoing and eventually there will be
5,000 new homes here.

Woolwich is certainly no stranger to redevelopment: nearly
all the old town centre between Beresford Street and the river has long since
vanished under successive attempts to sweep away what was once regarded as one
of the worst slums in London. An 1847 source quoted by Nikolaus Pevsner and
regularly requoted since contrasted the Arsenal, with its military order and
imposing buildings, with its surroundings, “the dirtiest, filthiest and most
thoroughly mismanaged town of its size in the Kingdom”. Beresford Square itself
was not a planned space, owing its current shape to 1960s slum clearance. The
A206 road built in 1986 roughly follows the line of the old High Street from the
west and then turns south to trace the line of long sheds where rope was once
made, disrupting the former street pattern as well as cutting off the gatehouse
from the Arsenal.

The quickest way to the riverfront is along the busy and
part-pedestrianised shopping streets north of Beresford Square, which began to
develop in the late 18th century when Woolwich New Road was built to
link the Arsenal and the military establishments on the common, but now have a
decidedly 20th century appearance. Among Woolwich’s more trivial
distinctions, the McDonalds on Powis Street is the very first branch of the US
fast food chain in the UK, opened in 1974.

Finally, you cross the A206, here named High Street –
though it’s hard to imagine this busy dual carriageway as the commercial centre
of an ancient town. The parish church, dedicated to St Mary Magdalene, is over
to the left, on the other side of the busy roundabout where the A206 crosses
the South Circular Road and the ferry approach. Its history dates back at least
to Saxon times, although the current building dates from 1739 and is located a
little to the south of the original site. Just a few steps away on this side of
the roundabout is a more recent religious institution, the Cathedral of Christ
Faith Tabernacle, occupying a former showcase art deco Granada cinema built in
1937 with a lavish Gothic-style interior, now Grade II*-listed.

The 1970s Waterfront Leisure Centre in front of you as you
cross the road covers a site that was once dense with narrow streets lined with
poor housing, the so-called Dust Hole where in the mid-19th century
up to five families lived in a single room. Between the centre and the
adjoining slipway, you follow an alley to the riverside which preserves its old
name, Bell Water Gate.

The slipway to your right shadows the river access to
the original dockyard where Henry grace à
Dieu was constructed, now buried under the adjacent car park. The same site
housed the gun wharf where the Arsenal began, then from 1893 a power station
which was demolished in 1919. To the south of this, on the corner of the alley
and the High Street, was Market Hill, the official market site from 1670 and
once home to the parish cage and stocks. On the other side of the car park,
downstream towards the Arsenal site, is the location of the Celtic settlement,
now a public park, Maribor Park. The leisure centre itself is due for
demolition to make way for another new residential quarter with five towers,
replaced by a facility in the town centre where swimmers will no longer enjoy a
view of the Thames.

Reaching the riverside, you turn upstream along the
official Capital Ring link. This is also the Thames Path, or rather the Thames
Path Extension, not officially designated as a National Trail but a
continuation of the riverside walkway created by Greenwich and Bexley councils
as part of National Cycle Network Route 1. It will eventually also form part of
the English Coast Path as far as the southern portal of the Woolwich Foot
Tunnel, which you soon encounter tucked away in a yard behind the leisure
centre. This is where you’ll emerge when you complete the last section of the
Ring, and it’s on the route of another trail, the Jubilee Greenway, indicated
by the pavement plaques.

Woolwich Foot Tunnel southern portal: conveyor of many trails.

Amazingly, this curious little red brick rotunda is now
the oldest building in the riverfront area of Old Woolwich: the tunnel opened
in 1912, thanks largely to the efforts of ex-docker and local Labour MP Will
Crooks, who commissioned it as chair of the London County Council’s Bridges
Committee. Back then, the area around the tunnel portal on the opposite side,
North Woolwich, was also officially within Woolwich: incorporated into the
mediaeval manor, it was for centuries the only part of Kent on the north bank
of the Thames, an anomaly only resolved in 1965.

The alley leading from the tunnel to the ferry approach
preserves another name from the old days, Glass Yard, running past the control
building for the Woolwich Free Ferry. There’s been a ferry here since Saxon
times, and it’s referenced in the Domesday survey. The link gained in
importance with the growing naval and military presence in Woolwich and in 1810
the Army established its own ferry. A commercial service provided by the
Eastern Counties and Thames Junction Railway from 1846 soon proved inadequate, and
in 1889 the London County Council launched a free steamer link, commissioned by
its predecessor the Metropolitan Board of Works. The ferry incidentally helped
level some of the slums of Old Woolwich, demolished to make way for a new ferry
approach and pier.

In the 1920s the Woolwich Free Ferry became part of an
orbital road route around London, linking the ends of the North Circular and
South Circular roads in the east. But by the end of that decade it was already
struggling to cope, and conversion to the current RORO (Roll On Roll Off)
system in 1966 only temporarily eased the burden. Now operated by Briggs Marine
for Transport for London, the ferry remains a bottleneck for road traffic,
particularly when the one-boat service is in operation weekends and evenings
and the vehicle queues back up along the South Circular.

But it's a
delight for walkers and cyclists, providing a free ride and wide views along
this straight stretch of the Thames. There have been numerous proposals for
replacing it with fixed links and/or a ferry crossing further downstream, none
of which have so far borne fruit, and the service, which is specified under an
1885 Act of Parliament, is likely to continue for the foreseeable future: new
boats are currently on order and should be in service from 2019.

Woolwich Dockyard

Once dry, forever wet: one of the former graving docks at the Royal Naval Dockyard, Woolwich.

In the 1540s, the Royal Dockyard moved a little
upriver to what became known as the King’s Yard, a less restricted site
upstream of what’s now the ferry approach. In the 17th century it
had become a relatively minor installation in comparison to Deptford and newer
naval dockyards at Plymouth and Chatham, but its fortunes improved in the 18th
century when for a time it was the most productive shipyard in England,
expanding further upriver in the 1780s to double in size, most of it
constructed by convict labour.

It was particularly busy during the Napoleonic
wars of the early 19th century, but soon afterwards output began to
decline in the face of two challenges: river silting reducing depth, and the
restricted space of the site as ships continued to increase in size. But the
dockyard still managed to build several important vessels, including, in 1830,
HMS Beagle, the ship that took Charles Darwin to South America and Australasia.

The development of new technology brought new life to the
dockyard. From 1831 it acquired a specialist role as the main naval steam
factory, both manufacturing and repairing steam engines. Once again, though, it
was eventually outgrown by yards elsewhere, at Portsmouth and Devonport. The
last wooden battleship built for the Royal Navy, HMS Repulse, emerged from the
yard in 1868 and it finally closed the following year.

But as naval activities declined in the town, ordnance
activities increased, and the site was converted into additional storage for
the Arsenal, complete with a private railway: the tunnel under the main road
which connected this to the SER is now a pedestrian subway, though a little off
our route. In the early 20th century part of the site was used by
the Army for administrative purposes: during World War I it housed the largest army
pay office. In 1926, the newer western section was sold off to the Royal
Arsenal Cooperative Society. The eastern part remained in Ministry of Defence
hands for a few more decades as an adjunct to the Arsenal, but was finally
demilitarised in 1966, following the closure of the Royal Ordnance Factory. In
the early 1970s much of it was redeveloped into a social housing estate by
Greenwich council, preserving some of the late 18th century
buildings.

Little obvious remains today of the easternmost part of
the Yard: first there’s a derelict patch surrounded by a hoarding, destined for
yet more residential development, and then the cluster of upmarket flats from
the early 2000s at Mast Quay. But the two slipways you cross along the
riverside promenade, though reinforced with modern gabions, correspond to the
positions of two similar facilities on John Roque’s 1746 London map. The larger
one was once a dry dock used for repairs.

You could easily miss these thanks to the distraction of
the view, upriver through the cowls of the Thames Flood Barrier to the O2
(formerly the Millennium Dome), the towers of Canary Wharf and peeking above
all these the Shard at London Bridge. This view has changed beyond recognition
since I first walked this way in the mid-1990s. It confirms not only how
determinedly London has finally caught up with the skyscraper age but how its
centre of gravity has slowly migrated downriver, occupying the vacuum left by
declining maritime industries, the reason for its trading pre-eminence in the
first place.

Further on, you reach the 1970s housing estate and some
more substantial reminders of the past: two docks behind railings on the left.
Back in the 1540s these were the heart of the complex: the original pair of ‘graving’
docks in which keels were laid and ships assembled, originally kept dry in
normal use. They’ve been rebuilt several times and are now permanently flooded,
having been repurposed as placid ponds popular with local anglers, though looking
increasingly littered and neglected recently. Although the docks themselves are
reduced in size, their footprint gives an idea of quite how limited the
facilities here became as ships grew, even after the western dock (the second
you pass) was enlarged in the early 17th century to accommodate two
vessels end-to-end.

Between the docks is a rather neglected pavement mosaic
depicting zodiac signs which has nothing to do with the surrounding heritage
but commemorates Elfrida Rathbone (1871-1940), a pioneer of education for
children with learning difficulties. Her special school in Kings Cross led to
the formation of two charities, one of which, Rathbone, which provides
work-based training for young people and adults with special needs, installed the
mosaic in 1986. Further on is Gun Drill Battery, once the main landing place
for the dockyard. In 1847 a battery was built here as an exercise facility for
the Royal Marines stationed on the site. It’s been heavily restored and the
guns aren’t the original ones – their carriages are 2005 reproductions – but
you can still appreciate its ‘spectacle’ structure, with two linked stepped
platforms behind low fort-style walls facing the river.

A path from the battery provides a link to Woolwich
Dockyard station, also on the North Kent Line. It takes you past some of the
surviving historic buildings, including the Clock House, completed in 1884 and
now a community centre, and the preserved main gates. But the Ring stays on the
riverside path, over a white stepped cantilever footbridge known as the
Linkbridge, installed in 2000 (there’s an alternative but more roundabout route
avoiding the steps). You may be surprised to find this crosses nothing more
substantial than a wall, but since this is part of the flood defences, they
couldn’t just knock a hole in it instead.

On the other side of the wall is the western part of the
dockyard, sold to the Royal Arsenal Coop in the 1920s. The land nearest the
river was redeveloped in the 1990s as the King Henry’s Wharf housing estate, including
a new stretch of riverside promenade, but unfortunately the Ring can’t make use
of the whole length of this as it reaches a dead end where access is still
blocked. Before you turn away from the river, pause for a good look at the
Thames Flood Barrier, completed in 1984, as this is the closest you’ll get to
it on the official Ring route. The cowls conceal the lifting machinery for ten
gates that normally rest on the river bed, but can be rotated to close off the
river completely against tidal surges. As other trails like the Green Chain
Walk and Thames Path visit the barrier itself, I’ll say more about it in a
later post.

The steam factory mentioned above was located in this
section of the dockyard, and some of its buildings remain, most obviously the
55 m octagonal brick chimney built in the late 1830s, which looms ahead on the
corner of Ruston Road. The boiler shop to which it was once attached has been
demolished. Some of the original steam factory buildings, including the smithy
and brass foundry, renamed the Commonwealth Buildings by the Coop, remain on
the south (left) side of Ruston Road, but otherwise the scene is much changed
since the dockyard’s heyday.

Where the flats now stand on the north of the
road, there were once two large water-filled ‘steam basins’, big enough for
ships to moor up while their engines were fitted or repaired. The national
Cooperative Wholesale Society, which eventually took over the Royal Arsenal
Coop, still operates businesses in some of the buildings further away from the
river.

The next site upriver was once home to another major
industrial undertaking, though of a commercial nature. In 1863, the
Berlin-based telegraphy company Siemens built a cable factory here, which
became one of several competing cable-making sites along the stretch of the
river from Greenwich to Woolwich. The factory subsequently expanded into making
telephone, signalling, wireless, measurement and lighting equipment, and at its
peak in the 1940s employed 9,500 staff.

During both world wars, the plant was
seized by the government as enemy property. After various mergers and takeovers
in the 1960s it finally closed in 1968, a major upheaval to the local economy.
Much of the site was then split into smaller units as the Warpsite Road industrial
estate: this is also now due for redevelopment which, when complete, will
provide an uninterrupted riverside walkway to the Barrier and beyond.

Meanwhile you’re forced along the busy A206 Woolwich Road,
with the former Siemens site to your right. The road is an old-established
inland route connecting the riverside towns of Greenwich, Charlton, Woolwich,
Plumstead and Erith across the lower ground between the river and Watling
Street, but it’s certainly no country track today. Marooned among the industry
is a late Victorian primary school, Windrush School, built in 1896 as Maryon
Park School, and next to it, the strikingly contemporary Royal Greenwich Trust
School, designed by architects Walters & Cohen, which occupies part of the
Siemens site and reuses some of its buildings.

This was opened in 2013 with the
support of the University of Greenwich as part of the government’s short-lived
attempt to create a network of University Technical Colleges (UTCs), teaching
technology, construction and engineering to older secondary students. But
admissions were much lower than expected, and in 2016 it was converted to a
conventional secondary school.

Lost in the forest of signs at Thames Barrier Gardens.

At the Warpsite Road roundabout, the trail crossed a
former parish boundary into Charlton, which until 1965 was also the division
between Woolwich and Greenwich boroughs. Just past the schools, a strip of
parkland, Thames Barrier Gardens, leads down to the barrier itself, through
more land once occupied by Siemens. The Thames Path, Jubilee Greenway and
National Cycle Network 1 all head this way to regain the riverside. This is the
point where the Ring joins the Green Chain Walk, a branch of which starts at
the barrier: we’ll be sharing paths with the Green Chain for the rest of this
section and all of the next. You could make a detour to the barrier here –
there’s a useful visitor centre and café as well as the view. But for now I’ll
stick with the main Ring route, which turns south, climbing onto higher ground
through Charlton’s remarkable chain of parks and green spaces.

Charlton and its parks

The next parish and manor upriver from Woolwich,
Charlton undoubtedly existed for many centuries before being recorded in the
1086 Domesday survey, but there’s also evidence of even earlier settlement
nearby. The name is from the Old English ceorltūn,
a ceorl being a freeman (later spelt
‘churl’ and the root of the names Charles and Carl) and tūn the regular suffix for a farmstead, the root of the modern
‘town’. There are numerous other Charltons, and this one has occasionally been
distinguished under the name Charlton-next-Woolwich. After the Norman conquest
it was briefly one of the many manors assigned to Archbishop Odo of Bayeux (see
my commentary on Crofton on London Loop 3), and was given in 1093 to Bermondsey
Abbey, which held it until the Dissolution.

There were numerous lords of the manor after this, but
perhaps the most significant is Adam Newton, who rebuilt the manor house in
grand style as Charlton House, of which much more later, and began to landscape
the surrounding estate. Between the Woolwich Road and the immediate surrounds
of the house was a thick woodland known as Hanging Wood, a reference to the
steepness of the Thames terraces here as they ascended from the river to the
plateau occupied by Charlton village, as the trees seemed to hang on the slopes.

Intermittent sand quarrying over the centuries made this terrain even more
precipitous, and in the 17th century the wood was regarded as a
dangerous place, a refuge of highwaymen who operated on nearby Shooters Hill
(though there’s little truth in the popular assumption that the wood got its
name because miscreants were hanged here when caught).

In the 18th century, the manor descended to the
Maryon-Wilson family, and by the 19th century the wood had been
tamed as a desirable feature of the park, which according to John Marius
Wilson’s Imperial Gazetteer of England
and Wales in 1872 afforded “a charming walk; and some sand pits in the
vicinity present great attractions to geologists.” The family gave the section
of woodland closest to the Woolwich Road, including several of the pits, to the
London County Council in 1891 for use as a badly-needed public park in what was
now a heavily populated area. One of the pits, Gilbert’s Pit, is now a separate
area where the geological layers revealed by the quarrying have been conserved,
designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). An alternative Green
Chain loop runs through this, so I’ll deal with it another post.

The official Ring route is through Maryon Park proper,
crossing the North Kent Line in its deep cutting and emerging into a formal
urban park with grassy lawns, tennis courts and surrounding shrubbery. You
wouldn’t guess it was a former sandpit, except for its location at the bottom
of a steep, shrubby slope, which gives it a secluded, almost melancholy
atmosphere. It was doubtless this which prompted innovative and influential
Italian arthouse film director Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) to choose it
as one of the key locations for his first English language film Blowup (1966).

The film stars David Hemmings as that stalwart Swinging
60s type, a successful but disconnected fashion photographer, who believes he
may unwittingly have photographed a murder taking place just inside the
woodland that fringes the park. Vanessa Redgrave is a woman who tries to
retrieve the incriminating film. The
tennis courts feature prominently in the enigmatic closing scene where a group
of mime artists use them to mime a tennis game. There’s a story that the lawns
weren’t vivid enough for the director, who had them covered with green paint.
Despite a gap of over 50 years, those familiar with the film will instantly
recognise the location, which has changed little, doubtless partly because of
its links to a work that has become a cultural icon of its time.

Steep steps climb the cliff face to the summit of Cox’s
Mount. Just to the west (right) here, overlapping the site of Gilbert’s Pit,
was a Celtic hill fort, later occupied by the Romans and excavated in the early
20th century. The strategic location of this high point overlooking
the river is obvious, and the promontory was once a familiar navigation aid for
Thames shipping.

Across Thorntree Road (formally Hanging Wood Road) is
another portion of Hanging Wood that’s now a public park. This is Maryon-WilsonPark, given to the LCC by the family a little later, in 1924. The gift included
a small fallow deer herd – the origin of the animal park which is now probably
the park’s best-known feature. The deer are descended from the stock donated in
the 1920s, and have since been joined by goats, pigs, ducks, geese and
chickens. In 2010, Greenwich council decided to get rid of all of them as a
cost-cutting measure, but a vociferous local campaign led by the parks’ active
Friends group persuaded it to reconsider. Instead the animal park was divested
to an independent charity, but this turned out not to be viable, so in 2015
this modest but much-loved local attraction passed back into council hands.

Further on, there’s a particularly pretty section through dense
vegetation dotted with mature trees, where the trail runs alongside a small
brook – the closest the Ring gets to invoking the atmosphere of the old Hanging
Wood. Since 2004, incidentally, both parks and pit have comprised a designated
Local Nature Reserve.

Charlton House glimpsed from the Ring: a possibly sinister past.

Across another road is another park, Charlton Park. Today
this is mainly a disappointingly featureless expanse of sports pitches, though
with several attractive avenues of mature trees, some small but delightful
garden areas and no less than three useful refreshment options. And it’s of
great historical interest as it’s been created from the gardens and inner park
attached to Charlton House, the biggest and best-preserved Jacobean mansion in
London and one of two especially fine domestic buildings on this section of the
Ring. If you follow the official route, rather than the obvious short cut
straight across the pitches, you’ll get a good view of the house, which is well
worth a detour for a closer look.

Alternatively, there’s an easy walk from Charlton station,
also on the North Kent Line, which goes right past the house. This isn’t an
official link – the signed Ring route to the station sticks to lower ground,
branching off on the northern edge of Maryon Park and passing the Valley, the
stadium of Charlton Athletic Football Club, which currently plays in League
One, actually the third tier of English soccer. The club was founded in 1905
and has been based here, with a few gaps, since 1919, in another of the sand
pits carved from Hanging Wood. But the alternative link is particularly
recommended as it includes Charlton’s historic village centre as well as the
house.

The village stands at the crossroads of two old roads:
Charlton Hill, which climbs from the Thames towards Watling Street, and
Charlton Park Road, linking Blackheath and Plumstead over the high ground above
the river: these briefly merge to pass the house. Charlton retains a
surprisingly village-like appearance so far within inner London, with pubs,
shops, church, war memorial, red K2 phone box and manor house clustered round a
small green at the road junction.

One of the pubs, the Bugle Horn, was knocked
together from three late 17th century cottages, while the White Swan
dates from 1889. St Luke’s Church is Grade II*, completed in the 1630s as the
latest of a series of churches dating back to at least 1077 on this site
fractionally down the hill. It combines the architecture of its day with
traditional Gothic styling, and contains numerous features including its
original font and pulpit and several monuments to occupants of the house.

The aforementioned Adam Newton (1560?-1630) was
responsible for the church as well as the house, though it was completed posthumously
by his executors using a bequest in his will. Born in Scotland, Newton is best-known
as the personal tutor to Henry Frederick Stuart (1594-1612), Prince of Wales
and eldest son of the first king of both England and Scotland, James I and VI.
He later became Dean of Durham, and undertook various scholarly works and
translations.

The house is often misattributed to architect Inigo Jones
but it’s more likely the work of another architect, John Thorpe, with several
more recent alterations. It’s an elegant three storey red brick mansion with
contrasting stone dressing, built on an H-shaped plan and surmounted by a
charming clock tower. The main entrance, framed by carved and moulded stone, is
particularly impressive, and the interior includes a grand Jacobean staircase.

It’s
particularly striking in the context of its surroundings, “like finding an
epigram in the middle of an official report,” as architecture critic Ian Nairn
put it. Used as a hospital in World War I, it was finally sold by the
Maryon-Wilsons to Greenwich council in 1925, though since 2015 has been managed
by an arms-length charity, the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust. Parts of it are
open as a café and library, with rooms rented to community groups. But much of
it remains closed to visitors, except by special arrangement.

On the village side of the house is a separate garden-house
or orangery of the same period, which suffered the indignity of being converted
into a public lavatory, now closed. Next to this is a venerable mulberry tree,
planted in 1608 and perhaps the oldest of its species in the UK. It’s a remnant
of one of James I and VI’s pet projects, to establish silk industries in both
England and Virginia. Unfortunately, he imported and planted the wrong kind of
tree, Morus nigra or black mulberry
from the Middle East, rather than the East Asian white mulberry (M alba) preferred by silkworms. The prettiest
gardens, including the remains of a walled garden, are to the south of the
house.

There are numerous strange stories connected with the building.
Newton had a rather undocumented past, leading a local writer, Ron Pepper, to
speculate in a ‘hidden history’ privately published in 1985, that he was a
member of secret society the Priory of Sion. His student Prince Henry, the heir
apparent, died aged 18 – according to Pepper, he was disposed of because he
failed to comply with the Priory’s plans to control the throne.

Bad luck is
said to have plagued subsequent owners and residents: Newton’s son, also named
Henry and a good friend of diarist John Evelyn, who regularly visited from his
home in Deptford nearby, picked the wrong side in the Civil War and was forced
to sell the estate. East India merchant William Langhorn died childless in 1714
and is said to haunt the place still. Spencer Perceval (1762-1812) was (so far)
the only British prime minister assassinated in office, shot in the House of
Commons lobby, not by a revolutionary but an obsessive who believed the
government had not done enough to help his wife when she was imprisoned in
Russia. Then, workers repairing World War II damage found the remains of a boy
in a chimney breast, either a baby or an adolescent depending on which account
you hear.

Speculation about the house has been fuelled by some of
the more bizarre details of its decoration, both inside and out: “the most
exuberant and undisciplined ornament in all England,” according to Pevsner. You
don’t have to look far to spot gargoyles, grimacing faces, human-animal
chimerae and horned demons. The faces on the staircase get uglier as you climb.
Current manager Edward Schofield explains this by pointing out they were intended
to deter rather than invoke evil
spirits, who were thought to prefer the upper floors, which therefore required
enhanced deterrence. Nairn finds the result melodramatic in a decidedly
Germanic way, “like a stray from some Baltic waterfront…[which] suddenly erupts
into sinister poetry.”

An inspiration for the demonic faces might
be found in the even more notorious Charlton Horn Fair. In 1238, Henry III
granted Bermondsey Abbey the right to hold both a weekly market and an annual three-day
fair at Charlton, around Trinity Sunday eight weeks after Easter. The market
ceased in the mid-17th century, but the fair, which by now had been
moved to start on St Luke’s Day, 18 October, persisted for more than two
centuries, taking place on a now-vanished green between the house and the
church.

Annual fairs contributed to the business of agriculture and industry by
providing networking and trading opportunities, but they also had a social and
recreational function for a population which otherwise largely did manual work
from dawn to dusk on every day except Sundays. They became both carriers of
folk traditions and an important pressure valve for people living hard and
short lives.

The Horn Fair evolved into one of the most popular of such
events in the southeast, and by the mid-18th century was attracting
more than 15,000 people, many of them arriving in flotillas along the river.
Its name derives from the tradition of participants wearing horns on their
heads, drinking from them and blowing them as instruments. The horned ox is one
of the traditional symbols of St Luke, but horns are also associated with the
pagan tradition of Herne the Hunter and of course the Judaeo-Christian Devil.
And they have a sexual connotation too: cuckolds, the husbands of adulterous
wives, are traditionally said to wear horns.

Until 1768, the celebrations began
with a lengthy procession, starting at Cuckold’s Point beside the Thames on the
tip of the Rotherhithe peninsula. There’s a legend that this got its name when
King John bribed a miller who lived there to let him have sex with his wife,
but more likely the name derives from the procession.

Indeed, the fair became particularly notorious for its
licentiousness, drinking and sexual activity, as well as perpetuating the folk
tradition of the ‘world turned upside down’, with commoners assuming the roles
of monarchs, politicians and priests. Edward Walford in Old and New London (1878) coyly terms it “a carnival of the most
unrestrained kind”, and quotes a mid-17th century source who
describes revellers “disguised as kings, queens, millers, &c., with horns
on their heads; and men dressed as females.” Others described it as “the rudest
fair in England.”

While such events were an acceptable part of mediaeval
life, as society became more complex and polarised, the ruling class looked on
them with increasing concern. At best, they were unrespectable, an excuse for
immoral and sinful behaviour. At worst, they were enablers of sedition and
rebellion. Charlton, sniffed novelist Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), was:

…a village famous, or rather infamous for the yearly collected
rabble of mad-people, at Horn-Fair; the rudeness of which I cannot but think,
is such as ought to be suppressed, and indeed in a civiliz'd well govern'd
nation, it may well be said to be unsufferable. The mob indeed at that time
take all kinds of liberties, and the women are especially impudent for that
day; as if it was a day that justify'd the giving themselves a loose to all
manner of indecency and immodesty, without any reproach, or without suffering
the censure which such behaviour would deserve at another time.

Objectors were particularly concerned that such behaviour took
place right next door to a church, and in 1819 the event was moved to an area
known as Fairfields on the other side of the village. Concerns about the
potential consequences of “the mob” became sharper still as the fair took on an
ever more proletarian character, following both local industrialisation and,
from the 1850s, the railway, which made it accessible from all over London. It
was finally suppressed by Parliament in 1874. In 1973 it was revived as a
rather more sedate and family-friendly community event in the park – it’s
tempting to say “a pale shadow of its former self.” Since 2009 the parade from
Cuckold’s Point has been revived too. The new Horn Fair at first took place in
June, but since 2015 it’s returned to its traditional slot around St Luke’s
Day.

The next park along the Ring, reached by following the
slightly inaptly-named Inigo Jones Road and crossing Prince Henry Road, is
known as Hornfair Park, but only in commemoration of the event, not, as is
sometimes assumed, because it ever took place here. Opened in 1936, the park
was another part of the estate bought by the council, conserved as an open
space when the surrounding streets were built up. Today it’s essentially a
straightforward patch of grass: the unruliest it gets is the confected urban
ruggedness of the BMX track, opened in 2013 as another Olympic legacy.

Woolwich Common

The wild heath of Woolwich Common, still owned by the Ministry of Defence.

The Ring emerges beside the evocatively-named
council tower blocks of Greenwich Heights and crosses back into Woolwich by
entering Woolwich Common. This is the first of several examples on the trail of
a preserved London common – originally an area of rough ground thought
unsuitable for crops, nominally belonging to the lord of the manor, but which
local people – the commoners – had a right to use for specific purposes.

During
the inclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, hereditary
owners often attempted to fence off commons, extinguish commoners’ rights and
dispose of the land to their own advantage. The fragments that survive in
London are usually there because such attempts were resisted through popular
protest and the courts, though the latter were often unsympathetic. Woolwich is
something of a special case, as the threat came not from a greedy aristocrat
but from the Army and the state.

In mediaeval times, a wide and desolate heath stretched
across the high, sandy ground between Woolwich and Watling Street, very much
like Blackheath further west. Officially, it was part of the Eltham Palace
estate, of which more later, and therefore belonged to the Crown. But local
people exercised their traditional rights to graze animals during certain
seasons, to cut turf and to gather firewood. The parish poor were additionally
entitled to gather gorse, used as fuel and fodder for cattle and horses.

I’ve already recounted how Woolwich had developed by end
of the 18th century into a major naval and military centre. Both the
Royal Artillery Regiment and the Royal Military Academy had been based
alongside the Royal Arsenal on the Warren since they were founded in 1716 and
1741 respectively. But all three institutions were expanding and space there
was getting tight. In 1776, the Army began building a new Royal Artillery
Barracks on a site overlooking the northern side of the common. Completed in
1802, this still boasts the longest building façade in the UK, though as it’s
off our route and closer to another section of the Green Chain Walk, I’ll say
more about it in a later post. Then between 1796 and 1805 a new home for the
Royal Military Academy was constructed on the Common’s eastern edge.

Given the military’s desire for space not only for
building but for drilling and exercises, the temptation of all those open acres
already under state ownership right in front of their spanking new buildings
must have proved too much for the top brass. In 1802, the Army bought both
Woolwich and the adjoining Charlton Commons and extinguished commoners’ rights
under a series of Acts of Parliament, though at first only the northern part of
Woolwich Common, adjoining the Artillery Barracks, was fenced off. But the
barracks was already overcrowded and soldiers soon began building their own
shanty towns elsewhere on the Common. These became rife with diseases like
cholera but the Army did nothing, and it was left to Lady Maryon-Wilson to
replace them with new and better huts.

Just beyond the point where you cross over onto the common
is the extensive complex of Queen Elizabeth Hospital, opened in 2001 as a
replacement for several closed local hospitals and now operated by the
Greenwich and Lewisham NHS Trust. It’s been in the news a few times as it’s one
of the hospitals created under the ill-fated Private Finance Initiative (PFI)
system promoted by Tony Blair’s New Labour government. In 2012 it became the
first hospital to be put into ‘special measures’ largely thanks to the huge
deficit racked up by repaying £1million a week to the private sector under its
PFI contract without being able to claim redress for problems resulting from
poor design and cost-cutting during construction.

But in the 18th century this site was also open
heathland, geologically an extension of Woolwich common but known as Charlton
Common as it was on the other side of the parish boundary and attached to
Charlton manor. By the time the Army claimed it, some of it had already been
inclosed by the Maryon-Wilsons and annexed to their park, and part of this
later became Charlton Cemetery.

By the 1850s there was a straggling camp of
army huts on the remaining open ground, the work of both the Artillery and the
Cavalry. Once again there were health issues, including a diptheria outbreak, so
the camp was replaced by permanent buildings known as Shrapnel Barracks in the
1870s. The barracks grew until it had eradicated all that remained of Charlton
Common, and was itself replaced by the Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital,
opened in 1977 and closed due to defence cuts less than 20 years later in 1995.
The current NHS hospital is the result of an extensive rebuild though some
elements of the 1970s buildings remain.

Further encroachments followed throughout the 19th
century, prompting local disquiet which finally coalesced in 1928 with the formation
of the Woolwich Common Joint Committee, prompted by a proposal to build a
nurses home attached to one of the military hospitals. The Committee pushed to
regain public access to some of the encroachments and to institute joint
management which protected public use.

The military resisted the Committee’s
demands, but eventually a delicate compromise was reached which has held ever
since. The Commons are still technically under Ministry of Defence (MoD)
ownership, but significant areas of Woolwich Common are now managed as public
space, with permissive access to some other parts. Since 1975, Woolwich Common
and its surrounds have formed a designated Conservation Area, and it’s also a
Site of Borough Importance for Nature Conservation.

Today, the Common remains the last part of Woolwich with a
significant military presence, although it’s being progressively demilitarised.
The Royal Military Academy closed in 1939, though the site was used as a
garrison until decommissioning in 2002. A redevelopment as private flats has
just been completed. The Royal Artillery vacated its barracks in 2007: it was
subsequently used by other regiments and as a venue for the shooting events of
the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games but is now due for closure by 2028.

Crossing the Common, a fine vista opens on the left,
looking northwards towards the Thames and across its valley to Essex. This is a
good place to appreciate the differences in soil and vegetation between the
sparser and more heath-like northern side, on the left, which is on sands and
Woolwich beds, and the southern side on London clay, which is lusher and more
meadow-like. The path then turns south just inside the common perimeter, but a
short detour ahead affords a look at the newly redeveloped Royal Military Academy.
Just before you leave the Common, on your right, is the site of a covered
reservoir dug by convict labour in 1848 but never used.

The Ring reaches the busy junction where Academy Road, the
South Circular Road south from Woolwich Ferry, crosses the east-west line of
Shooters Hill Road. The latter is part of Watling Street, historically one of
the most important highways in Britain. Built just before the year 50 by the
Romans, partly along the line of a Celtic and possibly pre-Celtic trackway, it
linked Wroxeter, St Albans and London with the Channel ports and then onward
via ferry to Rome. Much of it has remained in use as a highway since.

This section
was turnpiked in 1718 by the New Cross Turnpike Trust as far as Dartford,
providing an important part of the overland route from London to Rochester,
Canterbury and Dover. In the 1920s it was designated as the A2, though its
function as a trunk road was superseded with the construction of a new dual
carriageway to the south, which we’ll cross later, and it’s now the A207. For a
bit more about the road’s history, see my post on the London Countryway 17b,
which crosses it south of Gravesend.

The road stays well away from the Thames marshes, taking
instead to the high ground south of the river. Here, it behaves as a
stereotypical Roman road, charging in a near-straight line over the summit of
Shooters Hill, to your left and now surmounted by a water tower. At 129 m, this
is the 10th highest point in Greater London (and was once the 2nd
highest point in the old London County Council area), though the Ring passes
just below it. The hill was once known for its mineral springs and in the 18th
century there were proposals to build a spa town, later abandoned. During World
War II, an important anti-aircraft battery was based here.

There’s a legend that the hill’s name derives from the
road’s unwelcome popularity with highwaymen, though more likely it commemorates
a mediaeval archery practice area. Nonetheless, armed robbery was once a
recognised nuisance here. This was a particularly isolated stretch of what by pre-20th
century standards was a very busy road, with a steep incline that slowed horses
down and plenty of hiding places for the ill-intentioned in the woods and
common on both sides. Dick Turpin is said to have operated on the Hill although
if he had been active in all the places that claim him, he’d have spent most of
his waking hours riding rather than robbing.

But there are numerous other accounts, and in 1810 a
tunnel under the hill was proposed to sidestep the problem. Some of the stories
contributed to the romantic image of highwayman as charming rogues. In 1719,
newspapers reported several robberies on the road within a few weeks, conducted
“all in a polite manner”. In 1752, a young victim asked his assailants to let
him keep a shilling for the coach hire: “they refused,” says the report, “but
otherwise behaved very complaisantly, shook hands with him and wished him
goodnight”.

As I said in my writeup of another historic crime hotspot, Hounslow Heath on
London Loop 9, most highwaymen were more likely desperate and violent
characters rather than folk heroes, with only an early death to look forward
to. The corpses of those caught and hanged were displayed near
the scene of their crimes pour encourager
les autres. Samuel Pepys records one such gibbet on Shooters Hill in April
1661, and “such a filthy sight it was to see how his flesh is shrunk to the
bones”.

You’ll cross towards the southeast corner of the junction,
where a gallows once stood. In 1852 this was replaced by a yellow brick police
station, making Eltham the only part of the Metropolitan Police District with
two such facilities, the one here thought necessary to deter crime on the road.
In 1915, a new and much bigger red brick police station was added next door,
right on the corner. Both are now in residential use, though the solid and
subtly fortified appearance of the more recent building reflects its original
function. On the opposite, southwest, corner is another military remnant, the
Herbert Hospital, built for veterans of the Crimean War in 1865, closed in 1977
but derelict until the 1990s when it was converted to flats.

Oxleas Woods

Looking south across the terraces of the former Castlewood House in Oxleas Woods.

If you’ve enjoyed the Capital Ring so far, it’s
about to get even better. The next 5 km is almost entirely off-road, through a
chain of outstanding green spaces, including one of the most extensive and
lushest tranches of ancient woodland in London and one of the capital’s
quirkiest buildings. There are several distinct areas of woodland – Castle
Wood, Jack Wood, Oxleas Wood, Shepherdleas Wood and Falconwood – and the more
open areas of Eltham Common and Eltham Park. But the woods are generally
grouped under the name of Oxleas Woods, or sometimes Shooters Hill Woodlands.

As with most royal palaces, the old estate attached to Eltham
Palace was vast. I’ve already mentioned it included Woolwich Common – between
this and Eltham itself was a swathe of woodland and common clothing the gentler
south-facing slope of the ridge of hills above the Thames. Sessile and
penduculate oak, hazel and birch covered soils too poor and steep for farming,
above the Woolwich Beds, with chalk close to the surface in places. From the
Middle Ages the wood was largely managed by coppicing, producing sticks for
tools, fencing and furniture. In 1679 the Crown leased it to John Shaw and his
descendants as a commercial enterprise. They began a programme of felling
mature oaks for structural timber, much of it used in the construction of ships
at the naval dockyards in both Woolwich and Deptford.

In the 19th century, parts of the wood were
parcelled off and sold as plots for upmarket private homes, particularly on the
woodland edge along Shooters Hill which provided easy access to central London.
Another chunk, including Oxleas and Shepherdleas woods, was annexed in the
mid-19th century to the nouveau
riche estate of Avery Hill, carved out of the east of Eltham manor by James
Boyd, a sugar refiner, but was not developed.

Though the woodlands were
technically privately controlled, in practice the public could roam freely
through most of them, and they became a popular recreational area for
Londoners, a development not entirely welcomed by some of the inhabitants of
the posh houses. By the early 20th
century, economic uses had declined and further development threatened, but the
recreational value of the woods was increasingly recognised as London became
ever more dense, and the area was hailed as “the Hampstead Heath of South
London”.

The London County Council (LCC) bought Castle Wood and
Jack Wood with the help of several local borough councils in 1924. In 1929 the
council bought the area that’s now Eltham Park North and in 1934 it added
Oxleas, Shepherdleas and Falconwood Field. Eltham Common, which had belonged to
the War Department since 1812 but never inclosed, was added to the LCC estate
in 1938. The gardens of several of the big houses were also incorporated as
these fell vacant. Together the open spaces cover a generous 133.5 ha. 77 ha of
this is a designated SSSI, while the wider site is a Local Nature Reserve. Like
most LCC sites, Oxleas was inherited by the Greater London Council (GLC) in
1965 and passed to the local borough, in this case Greenwich, when the GLC was
abolished in 1986.

Much of Oxleas Woods is classified as ancient semi-natural
woodland, and some patches at least have undoubtedly been continuously wooded
since the end of the last glacial period some 8,000 years ago. This is the
richest site in London for the rare species of wild service tree, Sorbus torminalis, a reliable indicator
of ancient woodland which only grows on land that has never been cultivated. But
the mixed history has resulted in an attractive and varied patchwork that isn’t
all dense woodland: the site includes open meadows, formal and overgrown
gardens and several interesting structures. It’s home to numerous breeding
birds including tree creepers, nuthatches, woodpeckers, chiffchaffs, long
tailed tits and the increasingly ubiquitous ring- necked parakeets. In 1987, a
specimen of a rare red hunting spider, Micrommata
virescens, was spotted here for the first time in London in 250 years.

A swathe of the woodland was almost lost at the peak of
Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s road building craze in the
1980s. The proposal developed from the various postwar schemes to provide ringways around
London, and the longstanding ambition to ease the bottleneck of the Woolwich
Ferry. A bridge was planned from Beckton to the derelict
marshes formally used as Royal Arsenal lands between Woolwich and Thamesmead
from where a motorway would run through Plumstead and the woodlands to the A2.

Two public inquiries approved the scheme on the basis that
much of the route through the woods would be in tunnel. The Department of
Transport (DoT, now the Department for
Transport) decided to press ahead with a cheaper cutting as the tunnel was too
expensive, began compulsorily purchasing homes in Plumstead and even built a
part of the road at Gallions Reach, currently a disused stump of a ‘road to
nowhere’. But local outrage coalesced in an energetic campaign led by People
Against the River Crossing and Friends of the Earth.

The plans were finally
cancelled in 1993, which marked something of a turning point in government
transport policy away from big road schemes. The lack of river crossings in
east London remains an issue, however, particularly as both the population and
the economy in this part of town continues to grow. There have been several
more proposals for crossings, though they are now rather more environmentally
sensitive.

The trail first cuts off Shooters Hill across the grassed
area of Eltham Common and climbs a set of rough steps through the first wooded
area. This is secondary woodland, which has developed since the 19th
century when grazing on the common gradually ceased. At the top of steps a
drive leads a little further up to the Ring’s highest summit, at 128 m.

The curious Severndroog Castle, Oxleas Woods.

Now a curious triangular castle-like structure in Gothic
style lies ahead, with hexagonal turrets at each corner. This is SeverndroogCastle, a folly designed by architect Richard Jupp in 1784. It was built to
commemorate Commodore Sir William James who, in April 1755, captured the island
fortress of Suvarnadurg, from the Indian Maratha Confederacy as part of the
East India Company’s efforts to impose its control on India during the First
Anglo-Maratha War. The island, then rendered in English as Severndroog, is on
the western coast of India, in the modern state of Maharashtra, between Mumbai
and Goa, and its name means ‘golden fort’, although the present building is in
ordinary brick. James died in 1783 and his widow, Lady James of Eltham, built
the castle as a memorial in what was then Eltham Park. It’s now a Grade II*
listed building.

The building was included in the woodland bought by the
LCC in the 1920s and for many years was a popular visitor attraction and
refreshment facility, but in 1988 Greenwich decided it was too expensive to
maintain and it was closed and boarded up, an intriguing but rather forlorn
site in its clearing in the woods. In 2002 it was leased to a community group
largely supported by volunteers, the Severndroog Castle Building Trust, who
secured a Big Lottery grant to restore it. Since 2014, it’s been open once
again as both a café and museum and is now one of the most delightful stopping
points on the Ring. It’s well worth paying the modest admission charge to climb
the 19 m high tower and admire the astonishing view south towards the North and
South Downs and east towards London. On a good day, you can see seven counties
if you count the now-abolished Middlesex.

The woods around the castle are ancient woodland, known
as Castle Wood. Wide views open to the south
as you descend through a terrace garden, once a rose garden attached to
Castlewood House along Shooters Hill, and enter Jackwood. The trail crosses the
top of a disused reservoir and an old track known as Stone Alley, then stumbles
on another unexpected structure: the former garden of Jackwood House, another of
the 19th century century villas along the hill, with its red brick
walls, rose gardens and a water feature dated 1873. Some of the trees round
here are exotic, planted as part of the garden. There’s a modern apiary nearby.

A particularly pretty woodland path finally emerges on
into a large area of grassland, occupying a wide slope, bright with wildflowers
and buzzing with insects in summer. Another big Victorian house, Wood Lodge,
once commanded the top of this slope. It was included in the LCC’s purchase of
Oxleas Wood but was considered too expensive to repair and maintain, so was
demolished and replaced with a café and toilet block. Today this is another
excellent and very popular pitstop on the Ring. Under the flatter southern part
of the meadow is a giant reservoir, built in the 1980s, which receives treated
water from the non-tidal reaches of the Thames and distributes it to local
homes.

The ring now runs through Oxleas Wood itself, skirting the
edge of the meadow to emerge on Rochester Way. This was one of the earliest 20th
century improvements to the old Watling Street route of the A2 from London to
Dover, opened in 1927 to provide a more level alternative to Shooters Hill.
It’s only a brief interruption in the woodland walk as Shepherdleas Wood is
immediately on the other side. The character of the woodland here is subtly
changed: there’s more clay in the soil and the undergrowth is denser.

In the middle of the wood is a Green Chain and Capital
Ring fingerpost that points out a more direct way to Falconwood station, but
the official Ring route bows westwards into the more open area of Eltham Park
North. This and the woodland were once part of the parkland of Avery Hill, of
which a little more later. The trail passes the Long Pond, an ornamental pond
dug in the mid-19th century as part of the landscaping and still a
pleasant spot surrounded by reeds and willows.

The A2 Rochester Way Relief Road near Falconwood, alongside Shepherdleas Wood. The Bexleyheath Line is to the right.

Looping back into the woods, the trail runs alongside a
straight cutting occupied by two parallel transport links. Closest to you is the Bexleyheath railway line, constructed by the Bexley Heath Railway Company (BHR)
under engineer Alfred Bean and opened in 1895. Local people had originally petitioned the South Eastern
Railway (SER) to build a branch through the area but when this was refused, the
railway was built as an independent initiative, branching from the SER at
Lewisham and continuing via Bexleyheath to Dartford. The company soon went into
bankruptcy and the SER was forced to take it over anyway. Running parallel to
the railway on the other side is a busy dual carriageway, the Rochester Way
Relief Road, the third iteration of the A2 Dover road through the area, opened
in 1988.

The trail crosses these on the Falconwood footbridge, the
official end of Capital Ring section 1. The main residential development of
Falconwood is further east on the other side of the woodlands, across the
boundary in the London Borough of Bexley, having originally been attached to
the manor of East Wickham rather than Eltham. Falconwood station, only a short
walk away, is just over the Bexley boundary but Falconwood Field, part of the
woodland complex immediately north of the station, is in Greenwich.

This was a
rural area until the 1930s when New Ideal Homesteads Ltd, the country’s largest
private housebuilder of the day and responsible for much of southeast London’s
suburbia, built an estate on what was known as Westwood Farm. But the
developers thought the name of the woodland on the other side more attractive,
so the new housing was named Falconwood Park. Originally the Bexleyheath line
ran straight through: Falconwood station was opened in 1936 to serve the estate
and the area soon became known simply as Falconwood.

Eltham and its palace

Conduit Head, Eltham, the first sign on the Ring of Eltham Palace.

Eltham was an established Celtic settlement and then
an important manor on the road southeast from London towards Maidstone as far
back as the 6th century. The name is most likely derived from an
Anglo-Saxon personal name, Elta, with the suffix ham, ‘settlement’. The manor was Crown property at the time of
Edward the Confessor in the mid-11th century. William of Normandy
gave it to Archbishop Odo, who is recorded as the manorial lord in the Domesday
survey, but when he was disgraced, it reverted to the Crown. It passed through
various hands over the next 200 years, until 1305 when Anthony Bek, the Bishop
of Durham, gave it to Edward Plantagenet, the Welsh-born fourth son of Edward I
and Eleanor of Castile – both he and his father had frequently been the
bishop’s guests there.

Two years later, Edward was crowned as Edward II and turned the manor house into a
royal palace, later giving it to his wife Isabella, ‘the she-wolf of France’, sister
of Philippe IV. Edward was a controversial monarch who clashed several times
with alliances of powerful and rebellious barons. The more sensational aspects
of his reign are well-known. He had a close and likely sexual relationship with
his advisor Piers Gaveston, who was widely resented at court for his influence
and later executed as a traitor. Eventually Isabella and her ally Roger
Mortimer staged a coup, forcing Edward to abdicate in favour of his son Edward
III. The ex-king died while imprisoned at Berkeley Castle in 1327, probably
executed on the secret orders of Isabella, allegedly by the insertion of a
red-hot poker in his anus, although this last grisly detail is very likely
untrue.

Notwithstanding Edward’s unpleasant fate, generations of
his successors made use of Eltham. They included Henry VIII, who as walkers completing
the London Loop will know, collected more palaces than wives, though in his
later life he preferred his other homes and leased out the rest of Eltham manor
to others. During the Commonwealth period in 1651, Parliament claimed and
privatised both palace and manor, and although both were reclaimed by the Crown
following the restoration, there were no more royal incumbents. The manor was
leased out again and over the following centuries the estate was gradually
broken up.

In Tudor times, Eltham also contained a smaller manor,
known as Well Hall, which between 1521 and her death in 1544 was home to
scholar and author Margaret More, daughter of Henry’s councillor Thomas More
(whom the king sacked and executed for opposing his divorce from his first
wife), and her husband William Roper. In the early 20th century,
Edith Nesbit, of Railway Children
fame, lived at the manor – more of her in the next section. By then, the
eastern part had been separated out into another country estate known as Eltham
Park.

Eltham remained rural until the early 20th
century, when Eltham Park was bought and built up by Scottish-born property
developer Archibald Cameron Corbett, a teetotaller who insisted there would be
no pubs on the estate. All the properties were sold with a covenant to enforce
this, but a change in the law in 2005 extinguished the requirement and in 2014
the first ever pub in Eltham Park opened, a micropub appropriately named after
the Long Pond.

New railway lines,
tram lines and the original 1920s Rochester Way prompted further development,
including several early social housing estates. In 1915, Woolwich Borough
Council built a ‘model’ social housing estate on part of the old Well Hall
lands, to accommodate the increasing demand for workers at the Royal Arsenal
prompted by the war. This became known as the Progress Estate when it was expanded
in partnership with the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society in the 1920s, and is
now a conservation area. In the following decades further council estates
sprung up on the former royal hunting park.

Thankfully, the planners realised the growing population
would benefit from local green space, and Eltham has a bit more of it than many
similar suburbs of the same period. Immediately across the Falconwood
footbridge is Eltham Park South, one of the earliest public parks in the area,
opened in 1902 after the LCC bought the remaining Eltham Park lands. It shows
its age by looking much more like a formal public park than the green spaces
north of the railway and A2, mainly consisting of open grass and sports
pitches, though there are avenues of mature trees. There was once a classic 1920s lido in its
northwest corner, closed in 1988. On the left is Eltham Warren Golf Club, one
of England’s oldest nine hole courses, opened in 1890 on former gravel pits
attached to Eltham Park.

The green walking is briefly interrupted by a link along
one of the streets of the Eltham Park estate, Glenesk Way. Developer Campbell
insisted the local street names honour places in his homeland: Glen Esk is the
longest of the Angus Glens. Along the road is a structure like a fat lamp standard
that’s lost its head: it’s actually a stink pole, designed to vent gases from a
sewer running beneath the pavement.

Then a stretch of former farm track,
delightfully named Butterfly Lane, leads past the open space of Pippinhall Farm
on the left. This is a rare surviving fragment of farmland in inner London,
with hedges dating back to at least the 14th century and a remnant
of mediaeval ridge and furrow in its southeast corner. It’s currently rented
from Greenwich council as rough pasture for horses, though may at some point
become a part of the public Avery Hill Park.

This was part of an estate created
from some of the Eltham manor lands in the early 19th century, and
is now a meeting point for several branches of the Green Chain Walk, so I’ll be
exploring it in more detail on a future walk.

The path out of Avery Hill Park leads past a curious
vaulted red brick structure, Conduit Head. Dating from the 16th
century, it once housed a tank and sluice that controlled the supply of water
from a nearby spring through underground conduits to Eltham Palace, both for
filling the moat and as drinking and washing water. It’s been a scheduled
ancient monument since 1956.

Regaining the street, you pass Holy Trinity Church, opened
in 1869 as the population began to expand. It’s best known for the Gallipoli
Chapel on the south side, originally the St Agnes Chapel, funded by a local
woman as a monument to family members in 1909. The vicar here during World War
I, Henry Hall, was temporarily an army chaplain who was wounded during the
disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Turkish coast in 1915, a campaign in which
well over 100,000 people died. Upon his return, he converted the chapel into a
permanent memorial to the 29th Army Division with which he’d served,
nearly all of whose members died in Turkey.

The trail crosses Footscray Road, part of the old coaching
route from London to Maidstone via Eltham. This was briefly numbered as the A20
in the early 1920s before the traffic was transferred to the Sidcup Arterial
Road, which we’ll encounter further south. Then there’s North Park, the sort of
street estate agents call “highly regarded”, laid out in the very late 19th
century along the edge of former palace parkland. Most of the houses are 1920s
Tudorbethan affairs but there are some late Victorian villas as well as more
modern buildings. Passey Place on the right leads north to the town centre,
which still retains its mediaeval high street, though much of the historic
fabric has been replaced by bland 20th century retail units.

A more historic atmosphere descends as you follow Tilt
Yard Approach and Court Yard to the gates of Eltham Palace. The building is now
managed by English Heritage and there’s a substantial admission charge, but a
lot to see, including elements from every period of its long and chequered
history. The most obvious of these is the moat, which you can glimpse from the
street without paying. Though the palace’s foundation date is unknown, a
substantial moated manor very likely stood here before the Norman conquest, and
by 1295 was accessed by a drawbridge, roughly where the bridge leading from the
main gate is today.

Edward II rebuilt the manor into a palace in the early 14th
century, and Henry IV entertained the Emperor of Byzantium here over Christmas
1400. Edward IV added the Great Hall in the 1470s. But from Henry VIII’s time
onwards, royal visits declined. Charles I was the last monarch to stay here, in
the 1640s, and during the Commonwealth period Nathaniel Rich, who bought the
estate from Parliament, dismantled many of the buildings to recycle their
materials, including the lead on the Great Hall roof. In 1656, John Evelyn
found “the palace and chapel in miserable ruins, the noble wood and park
destroyed.” For the next 200 years it was uninhabited and used as farm
buildings.

In 1828 the Great Hall had decayed so badly that it was
threatened with demolition, sparking one of the earliest modern heritage
conservation campaigns: the hall was restored but still suffered the ignominy
of being used as a barn. As Eltham’s residential appeal grew later in the 19th
century, the palace was inhabited again as a gentleman’s residence, but it was
to undergo a further dramatic transformation.

In 1933, millionaire Stephen
Courtauld, from a wealthy family of textile manufacturers, bought the place
with his wife Virginia. They commissioned architects Seely & Paget to
rebuild it as an ultramodern private house with a gallery for displaying their
extensive art collection, though encompassing heritage features like the Great
Hall. As keen horticulturalists, they also had the gardens reworked in
spectacular style, including ornamental plantations, shrubberies and specimen
trees.

16th century cottage on Court Yard, Eltham Palace.

The Courtaulds left Eltham in 1944 and the site was
occupied by Army educational units until 1992 when it passed to English
Heritage. Much of what’s on view today is their work, in the striking and
lavish Modernist style of the 1930s. But the Great Hall with its oak roof is a
substantial reminder of the building’s even grander past. Some of the walls and
the gatehouse on the left of Court Yard are from the 17th century,
the last time the palace was in its pomp. Opposite the Palace gates and clearly
visible from the trail, are the more modest but also historic cottages at 34-38
Court Yard. The street was once the outer courtyard of the palace and these
timber-framed red brick cottages with their projecting dormer windows were
built in the 16th century as lodgings for the Lord Chancellor and
other senior officials: Thomas More and Thomas Wolsey stayed here.

Walking with King John

For the next 1.5 km or so, the Capital Ring follows
an ancient lane known as King John’s Walk, which once connected the palace with
hunting grounds further south. This is a delightful stretch, astonishingly
rural given how deep in London we are, between old hedgerows with open space on
both sides. Yes, most of this is now horse paddocks and playing fields, but
it’s not that difficult to picture the scene in mediaeval times when these
fields would have made a vital contribution to the palace’s food supply. But
look right and the illusion is interrupted as the modern towers of central
London loom surprisingly close. Further along, yet another branch of the Green
Chain heads off down an even more rural path, but the Ring stays on the main
track.

The origin of the name is uncertain: it’s unlikely to be
the King John of Magna Carta fame (reigned 1199-1216) as he had no connection
to Eltham. More likely it was the Valois king Jean II of France (reigned 1350-64),
also known as John the Good. He surrendered to the English leader Edward the
Black Prince at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 by handing him his glove.

The king was held prisoner at various locations in England
while a peace treaty was negotiated, including Eltham, and in accordance with
his status he was allowed considerable freedom, buying clothes and pets and
maintaining a royal band. So he may well have walked or, more likely, ridden
this way to Mottingham while pondering the terms of what became the Treaty of
Brétigny. Jean eventually returned to France, leaving his son Louis as a
replacement hostage in Calais, then held by England. But Louis absconded, and Jean
shocked his subjects by voluntarily offering himself as a prisoner again for
the sake of the family honour. Never a well man, he died soon after returning
to London, at the Savoy palace on the Strand.

On the other side of the fields is the built-up area of
Middle Park, a social housing estate began in the 1930s on the former ‘middle
park’, a hunting park attached to the palace. But the Walk still maintains a
clear line across a patch of grass, over the Dartford Loop Line railway and the
A20 Sidcup Arterial Road.

The railway was opened in 1866 by the South Eastern
Railway (SER) as an alternative route to the North Kent line between Lewisham
and Dartford. Mottingham station is to the east, although historically speaking
it’s still in Eltham, and was indeed called Eltham until 1892, despite its
distance from the recognised centre of the latter. It was renamed Eltham &
Mottingham and then became plain Mottingham in 1927, to avoid confusion with
Eltham station closer to the town centre on the Bexleyheath Line. The road opened
in 1923 as a single carriageway, providing a bypass of Eltham for through
traffic on the A20 Maidstone Road. It’s since been widened and dualled, and is
now the main route out of London for Folkestone and the Channel Tunnel.

Mottingham

Along the river Quaggy between Mottingham and Grove Park.

On the other side of the road, the first field
boundary on the right marks the Ring’s farewell to the Royal Borough of
Greenwich as it enters Mottingham, in the London Borough of Bromley. The
earliest record of the place name is from 862 as Modingahema, ‘the land of Moda's people’. It was once a hamlet attached
to Eltham but became a separate parish in 1866, the same year the railway
opened, in anticipation of the growth in population that would surely follow.
When the County of London was created in 1889, Mottingham was excluded,
remaining in Kent as a peninsula of that county poking into the capital. At
first it was administrated as a ‘detached part’ of Bromley Rural District, then
in 1934 transferred to Chislehurst and Sidcup Urban District.

Until 1965 you would have left London here, but with the
creation of the new London Borough of Bromley in 1965, Mottingham was finally
absorbed by the capital, as were other even more rural tranches of Kent which
had once been in Bromley Rural District. Following minor tweaking in the 1990s,
small bits of Mottingham were reunited with Eltham by being reassigned to
Greenwich, and a few went to Lewisham borough too. I’ve introduced Bromley and
its rather anomalous boundaries in more detail along London Loop 3.

King John’s Walk retains its near-straight line parallel
to a residential street and finally ends at Mottingham Lane. The trail now
follows the lane, with another branch of the Green Chain Walk heading off in
the other direction towards Elmstead Wood. Up until the mid-19th
century, the lane was the closest thing to a main drag in a rural hamlet, lined
by a scattering of houses.

Following the opening of the railway, private and, from
the 1930s, council developments took place elsewhere in Mottingham but the lane
still contains most of the bigger and older houses. The nucleus of the old
estate, Mottingham House, has vanished, replaced by the flats of Colview Court
on the left. The Old Chapel and St Vincent further along were once among its
satellite buildings. Just past the turnoff for the Ring is the site of Mottingham
Hall, another Victorian estate, now an equestrian and garden centre. Opposite
and now Grade II-listed is the Fairmount Ladies Rest Home, a name that couldn’t
be more evocative of late Victorian and Edwardian gentility, but mainly noted
as the home of celebrated cricketer William Gilbert Grace (1848-1915), who
spent his retirement here, as commemorated on a blue plaque.

At the footpath junction where the trail leaves the lane
is our first sighting of an official Public Footpath sign on the Capital Ring. Following
decades of lobbying by walkers’ and countryside groups, new legislation in 1949
strengthened protection of off-road Public Rights of Way by requiring local
councils, among other things, to keep official ‘definitive maps’ of them and to
sign them where they met roads and streets.

Originally the requirements didn’t
apply to metropolitan areas, like the old Woolwich borough, but did apply to
counties such as Kent. Amendments to the law in 1968 extended the requirements
to metropolitan councils – but still exempted the Inner London boroughs
covering the former LCC area. This is why you’ll see footpaths signed in outer
boroughs like Bromley, but not inner ones like Greenwich, and why the green
dotted lines on Ordnance Survey Explorer maps stop at the threshold of Inner
London. This doesn’t mean, however, that Public Rights of Way don’t exist in
Inner London. I’ve explored the topic in a bit more detail under LondonCountryway 2.

The fields of Mottingham Hall, to the left of the path,
and Mottingham Farm, to the right, are still open space, but private: horse
paddocks and sports fields respectively. The latter largely belong to the City
of London School, an independent boys’ day school in the City.

After a while the Ring becomes a riverside walk for the
first time since leaving the Thames. The river is the delightfully named
Quaggy, which runs entirely inside London, rising at Locksbottom in Bromley,
though in its upper reaches it’s known as the Kyd Brook. It flows for 17 km,
including a stretch beside London Loop 2 near Petts Wood, through Sundridge
Park, Grove Park, Lee and Hither Green to join the Ravensbourne at Lewisham,
itself a tributary of the Thames. This stretch has been diverted in a culvert
to avoid the former Grove Park hospital, which I’ll say more about in the next
section. The origin of the name is unknown but it may be related to an obsolete
word quaggy meaning ‘boggy’ or
‘muddy’, as in ‘quagmire’.

The river is a sign the Ring has descended from the
high ground into the wider Ravensbourne Valley: it will shortly cross the river
and its two main tributaries before ascending again towards Sydenham Hill and
Crystal Palace.

The trail runs alongside the car park, past the pavilion
and along the drive belonging to the Old Elthamians, which currently plays in
National League 1, the third tier of English rugby union. Originating in 1911
at another independent school, Eltham College, in Mottingham itself, the club
has been based at various grounds but in 2016 moved to the College’s own
property, College Meadow, on the other side of the pavilion.

Reaching the area of the car park, you would once have
stood at the point where the southern edge of Mottingham and Eltham met the
parish of Bromley. A boundary still runs through here, but it’s been moved a
little to the south and the areas it separates are much transformed. Passing
the fence line of the back gardens of the houses to the right as you approach
the street, you now leave the modern London Borough of Bromley for the time
being. While the rugby club is in Bromley, the southern tip of its access drive
is in the Capital Ring’s third London borough, Lewisham, in the district known
as Grove Park.

Grove Park

Grove Park station, on one of London's oddest branch lines.

Until the 18th century, the area
south of Lee and Mottingham, between the Quaggy and the main stream of the
Ravensbourne, was thickly wooded. Much of the woodland was cleared in that
century, and very little remains today, though references remain in place
names. ‘Grove’ is of course a word for a small wood. And the road that links Lee
with Plaistow and Bromley is variously known as Burnt Ash Lane and Burnt Ash
Road, commemorating the fate of many of the trees, which were burned to make
charcoal.

A late 18th century map shows the area as part
of Bromley parish, in the Kentish hundred of Bromley and Beckenham, with most
of the trees already cleared to create farmland. Marvels Lane, the road on which
the Capital Ring emerges, appears as a rural lane crossing the remaining band
of Stratfield Wood to the south. To the southwest of the road was a farm called
Grove Farm, which eventually gave its name to the station and then the suburb.

In the mid-19th century much of the land was
dug up for earth to make bricks, and large luxury houses started to appear. But
even after the railway opened in 1871, attracting wealthy commuters, activities
such as dairy farming and plant nurseries continued. As development spread, Grove Park became more
linked to Lee and Lewisham than Bromley. It was included in the London County
Council area in 1889 and in 1905 became part of the Metropolitan Borough of
Lewisham. The current and much enlarged London Borough of Lewisham was created
in 1965 by merging the Metropolitan Boroughs of Lewisham and Deptford.

The densely populated character of the area was confirmed
when the LCC built one of its earliest large housing estates, the Downham
estate, to the west of Burnt Ash Lane in from the 1920s: much more about this
in the next section. Lewisham council built its own estate, the Grove Park
Estate, slightly southeast of the Ring route, between 1926 and 1929. The last
farmland fell to housing in 1960, but patches of green are preserved in the
form of parks and playing fields.

Section 2 of the Capital Ring officially ends where the
rugby club drive meets Marvels Lane, right by the bridge over the Quaggy.
Section 3 strikes off northwest across the river, but the link to the station
continues upriver, now hemmed in by houses, and not signed as a public footpath
as we’re back in Inner London, to reach Chinbrook Road by another bridge. The
river now runs on through a pleasant park with a good café, Chinbrook Meadows,
but that’s for later on the Green Chain Walk. For now, our way is west across
the Quaggy and along Chinbrook Road, to reach the Lee-Bromley road, here known
as Baring Road, with the station just around the corner.

The railway is part of the South Eastern Main Line from
London Charing Cross and London Bridge to Ashford, Folkestone and Dover, once one
of the main rail routes from London to Paris and beyond via the Channel
ferries. Originally the SER used a roundabout route via the London and Brighton
Railway’s tracks to Reigate, but in 1868 it finally obtained its own route out
of London with the opening of this stretch of railway via Lewisham and
Orpington. Grove Park station itself was opened a few years later, in 1871.

As
well as the main line it also boasts one of London’s more obscure branch lines,
opened from here to Bromley North station in 1878 as an SER-sponsored project
to compete with its arch-rival the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, which had
a station at Bromley South. As there’s no longer the capacity to operate direct
services from Bromley into London Bridge, the line is operated for now as a
shuttle service with just two stops. There have been numerous proposals to make
better use of it, perhaps by incorporating it into an extension of the London
Trams network via central Bromley.